Beaumont Newhall, in his authoratative text on Evans' career, describes how the photographer met Beardslay when the young draftsman was eighteen and a frequent visitor to Evans' bookshop on Queen Street, Cheapside, London. As a clerk at the Guardian Insurance Company, Beardsley had yet to become the noted illustrator and patriot of Art Nouveau he was destined for. Evans, however, was so impressed with the youth's art that he willingly exchanged books from the shop's inventory for his drawings. It was through Evan's recommendation that the publisher John M. Dent hired Beardsley to illustrate Sir Thomas Malory's classic of King Arthur legends Le Morte d'Arthur. In a catalogue of Beardsley drawings from Evans' collection, produced for New York's Anderson Galleries in 1919, Evans recalled that He had shown no hint or evidence whatever of the particular style his genius developed into later....All I had to go by then was a certain freshness of idea, a more than hint of a positive and rare beauty of line, which instinctively made me feel that whatever he did for the 'Morte d'Arthur' would be at least out of the ordinary rut of illustrating. No one then could have forseen the tremendous powers he was to express later; but it is a morsel to one's credit as a lover of beauty to have seen enough in him so early as to hazard such an introduction. Newhall also mentions that a friend remembered the sitting by stating that Evans "spent hours wandering around the gaunt youth, wondering what on earth to do with him, when Beardsley, getting tired, relaxed and took the pose which Evans immediately seized."
Beardsley, who died in 1898, age 26, was memorialized by Evans in 1919 when the former bookshop proprietor published a portfolio of 12 platinum prints, reproducing Beardsley's drawings, Grotesques by Aubrey Beardsley.


An example of this limited edition is in the Gilman Paper Company Collection.